Google Analytics
Crazy! Google Analytics (which was previously known as Urchin) is now a free service for anyone. Great news for developers wanting to get some real stats on their sites.
We've added Google Analytics to the site now. It'll add a 5k or so javascript to each page, so it shouldn't make too much difference with browsing speeds. What it will do is let us know where and how to improve the user experience of the site. Good news for all.
What is Google Analytics?
From the Google Analytics website it says "Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and how they interact with your site. You'll be able to focus your marketing resources on campaigns and initiatives that deliver ROI, and improve your site to convert more visitors."
The great thing is the Urchin service used to cost $200 a month, and since last night Google has decided to to give it away. Although people seem concerned with how Google will use the data they'll collect, I imagine Google already know enough about how we visit sites and our surfing patterns, so I don't think it's anything to be too concerned about. Personally I'd like to see Google take over the world, at least they seem to always get things right.
What if I don't want Google tracking my every move?
You could easily block any data from google-analytics.com with your favourite browser (IE, Safari or Firefox), and that'll keep you off the Google Radar! If you also wanted to block the Google Adsense ads, you could block any data from googlesyndication.com
At the end of the day, I doubt Google is out to rule the world, but these sorts of advances certainly help us web developers do a better job. Once we get a month or so of stats under our belts, we'll start analysing the data to see how we can improve things on the site. At the end of the day, everyone wins!
Why Google Analytics?
Along with the pretty graphs and charts, it'll also give us a better indication of how people use the site, and what they're looking for. We currently use a simple custom built stats system, as well as awstats to track where people go and what they do. The other good thing is the stats will be more accurate in terms of actual users visiting the site. The problem with many of the free stats packages (or anything that uses your server log files), is the results are always exaggerated, and that's something we don't want. As an example, in the last 7 days we've had over 60,000 visits by search engine bots, a lot of which get included in the stats as they're mostly unknown bots (ie. webwombat, nutch, countless blog pings, etc). So when you look at the site's stats and it says "WOW, we had 1,000 visitors today", what it really means is we had 500 different automated bots, and 500 visitors actually visit the site. Hardly the same thing.
A Funny Story.
Late last year we had a meeting with one of the local businesses about developing their site (we didn't get it in the end as we quoted too high!). So anyway, he started asking about stats as he already had 2 sites up by other local portal sites. He was telling us how one of the sites was getting a lot of visitors (thousands a day apparently), and the other wasn't getting too many. What was interesting about that was it was actually the other way around. The guy behind the site getting loads of visitors was basically lying by quoting "hits" to his site. We find this sort of practise completely wrong (we also noticed he still quotes the "hits" to his site). The thousands of visitors he was receiving was probably about 20 as everytime someone loads a single page, they probably generate up to 50 hits. You go to 20 pages, and that's 1000 hits to your site. In the real world, that should be considered 1 visit (although I can sort of see why some people would prefer 1000 to 1 though, but it's so damn wrong). This sort of thing seems to happen a lot in the Southern Highlands.
Anyway, now that the official site for that particular business is up, they are getting just over 100 visitors a day (which in reality is probably about 50-70 real visitors due to the bot issue). They've also had an amazing 4 referrals this month from the site that was receiving thousands of visitors a day. I guess what we're trying to get at is that real stats are important cause at the end of the day, bloated stats helps noone. It'd be no different to putting a few extra zeros after your bank account balance and telling everyone how much money you have.
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